What strikes you first is the squalid nature of the women’s stories. Their husbands have beaten and abused them, they claim; lied and cheated, cavorted with prostitutes, become addicted to drugs.

One weeping wife even accuses her spouse of molesting her infant child.

Wearing colourful headscarves and robes, and often clutching handbags stuffed with banknotes to pay the £300 fee for their cases to be decided, this procession of downtrodden women have come before a panel of three judges to plead for their miserable marriages to be dissolved.

Four of the eight petitioners were born overseas — in Ghana, Ethiopia and Pakistan — and two speak such poor English that they find it easier to describe their marital woes in Urdu on this rainy Sunday afternoon in the heart of Birmingham.